Aviation View | April 2021

38 AVIATION VIEW APRIL 2021 development plan, and when our grants are approved we hope to be doing a $4,000,000 resurfacing of our runway. We have also been working on smaller infrastructure improvements and drainage work for part of our land.” Once COVID is over, Arnett believes “people will come back to flying. We want to start taking an aggressive partnership with our FBO and ask some tough questions about what we need to do to grow this airport into what it already has the capacity to be. I think of it as a diamond in the rough just waiting, I think we have something special here. So I guess our wish list starts with growing service. We want to get out there and see if we cannot convince some of those commuter services to utilize the airport on a daily basis. Basically, I want to up our enplanements. “Then we have to work at bringing the community on board, as well as the city. We need to start thinking about the importance of this airport economically, but also as a driver of tourism and perhaps even a destination, itself, where people want to come. Right now we have been doing our best with what he have. But if we just got the buy-in and investment, we would be on our way to sharing what we have to offer here in Anniston to even more people.” PREFERRED VENDORS n Department of Planning and Economic Development www.annistonal.gov n RMC Health System www.Rmccares.org